Date Thesis Awarded
4-2019
Access Type
Honors Thesis -- Access Restricted On-Campus Only
Degree Name
Bachelors of Arts (BA)
Department
Philosophy
Advisor
Dr. Christopher Freiman
Committee Members
Dr. Christopher Freiman
Dr. M. Victoria Costa
Professor Rebekah Sterling
Abstract
Multiculturalism aspires to offered permanent, codified, group-differentiated rights to help oppressed racial, ethnic, and national minorities. This thesis examines three of the major works in the multicultural literature -- Charles Taylor's Politics of Recognition, Iris Marion Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference, and Will Kymlicka's Multicultural Citizenship -- and argue that even though they're all predicated on entirely different bases (communitarianism, postmodernism, and liberalism) they all fail to liberate minority groups because of the creation of cultural "scripts", and furthermore have an unacceptable conflation of culture and ethical principles that will undermine the emancipatory project for those groups. When we appreciate these two factors, we should adopt Elizabeth Anderson's theory of Relational Equality that both respects individualism and the primacy of justice while appreciating the fact that achieving universal liberal rights will require the government to treat them differently minority groups differently in certain circumstances.
Recommended Citation
Siegmund, Will, "Difference without Deference: An Individualistic Theory of Group Accommodation" (2019). Undergraduate Honors Theses. William & Mary. Paper 1292.
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/1292
